Related to E. 9, one possibility (which I’m not sure is in the standard heuristics and biases tests) might be to exploit the reasonable disagreement type results in asking for people’s opinions on things on which there is significant expert consensus. In such circumstances, we may also want to allow those with greater expertise more leeway to differ from the consensus (where those with no particular expertise should probably just align with it) so maybe a question on expert knowledge of the area would be useful (as objective as possible to avoid self-inflation: majors, advanced degrees etc.).
As steven0461 suggests, if you could could come up with more of them, from different ends of the political spectrum that would be ideal.
Another possibility here might be to identify sets of beliefs that we wouldn’t expect to be correlated except by arbitrary factors like group identification. (I forget the usual example here: would abortion/global warming work?) The tendency for such beliefs to correlate might then serve as a (partial) rationality measure.
Are you referring to the final suggestion? If so, I think it should possible to analyze the data to avoid this. There are (very roughly) two ways to get low covariance between opinions: one is to have low variance in opinions generally (i.e. to have middling opinions on everything) , and seems to correspond to centrism. The other is to have a low correlation between opinions (e.g. you could have more extreme opinions, but from both ends of the political spectrum). If you focus on covariance, you’ll capture both, but because correlation is normalized for variance, focusing on that should help avoid “centrism bias” (I think).
Related to E. 9, one possibility (which I’m not sure is in the standard heuristics and biases tests) might be to exploit the reasonable disagreement type results in asking for people’s opinions on things on which there is significant expert consensus. In such circumstances, we may also want to allow those with greater expertise more leeway to differ from the consensus (where those with no particular expertise should probably just align with it) so maybe a question on expert knowledge of the area would be useful (as objective as possible to avoid self-inflation: majors, advanced degrees etc.).
As steven0461 suggests, if you could could come up with more of them, from different ends of the political spectrum that would be ideal.
Another possibility here might be to identify sets of beliefs that we wouldn’t expect to be correlated except by arbitrary factors like group identification. (I forget the usual example here: would abortion/global warming work?) The tendency for such beliefs to correlate might then serve as a (partial) rationality measure.
Won’t this create a bias toward finding a rationality/centrism cluster?
Are you referring to the final suggestion? If so, I think it should possible to analyze the data to avoid this. There are (very roughly) two ways to get low covariance between opinions: one is to have low variance in opinions generally (i.e. to have middling opinions on everything) , and seems to correspond to centrism. The other is to have a low correlation between opinions (e.g. you could have more extreme opinions, but from both ends of the political spectrum). If you focus on covariance, you’ll capture both, but because correlation is normalized for variance, focusing on that should help avoid “centrism bias” (I think).